Chapter 17-The Dead Remain

Odett’s POV

  Three mornings later, a coven near Arnald’s eastern border missed a protection check. Storms sometimes damaged boundary spells, so one missed call could mean very little. When the second call went unanswered, Arnald sent a patrol with a witch and a vampire investigator. I watched the departure time appear on Dad’s desk and hoped there were people waiting to answer the door.

  The team carried a document bearing both Arnald’s seal and the coven’s verification spell. For once, the guards let every investigator cross together. We still did not know what had happened to the coven, but no one would have to stand at a border while a colleague went in alone.

  “They lost eleven minutes,” Uncle Orian said with cautious approval after comparing the departure and crossing times.

  “The old procedure would have cost them at least half a day,” he added.

  “Eleven minutes is still a delay,” I replied while adding it to our timeline.

  “It is also an honest one,” Dad reminded me with a measured expression.

  “The guards confirmed the document, recorded the team, and released them,” he explained calmly.

  “A procedure that takes no time probably protects nothing,” Dad finished with practical certainty.

  Joshy wrote verification beside the eleven minutes. Dad was right that a guard had to check who crossed, but now the reason for the pause was visible. Edric had not accepted the agreement, and I knew one good border could not protect Sam everywhere.

  ‘One border learned something,’ Lorilie said with guarded satisfaction inside my mind.

  ‘One cooperating border,’ I corrected silently.

  The team reached the coven before noon. Dad closed the protected call when the site report began, leaving Joshy and me with the travel sheet. We recorded when the investigators arrived and when they entered. Anything they found inside belonged first to the people whose home it was.

  “You are tracking the procedure, not the site,” Dad said with firm emphasis before joining the restricted call.

  “If the investigators stop moving, we record when and for how long,” Uncle Orian added.

  “We do not ask what they found while they were stopped,” he warned seriously.

  “Understood,” Joshy answered without hesitation.

  “Administrative times only,” I agreed.

  The team waited thirty-two minutes at the coven entrance for a required verification. I wanted to ask what they were checking, but the form named only the procedure. That was enough to keep me from assuming someone had obstructed them.

  Joshy added the time to our new form while I wrote the approved reason beside it. The older records would have shown a gap between arrival and entry, leaving later readers to guess whether the team had been blocked, confused, or careless. The revised form preserved the difference without revealing anything protected inside the community.

  “This is what the old reports were missing,” Joshy said.

  “The same delay could mean caution, confusion, or someone refusing to cooperate,” he continued thoughtfully.

  “The number alone cannot tell us which,” I agreed carefully.

  A second administrative notice marked the team as admitted together. No investigator had been excluded because of species, and every name on the approved travel document crossed at the same time. We recorded that result without receiving their assignments or learning where anyone went after entry.

  Dad lowered the privacy barrier around the call. Voices blurred behind the spell, and Joshy glanced over once before returning to our page. He had been invited into the investigation with me, but neither of us had been invited into that room.

  “I know that look,” I whispered with amused suspicion.

  “I am looking at the clock,” Joshy replied with exaggerated innocence.

  “The clock is in the opposite direction,” I reminded him dryly.

  He turned his chair toward the correct wall and pretended the mistake had been deliberate. I wanted to laugh, but the sealed channel kept pulling at my attention. Being allowed into one part of the process made the closed portion feel more noticeable, even though the boundary had not changed.

  The next update contained only three approved entries: initial review completed, formal inventory begun, and joint documentation procedure accepted. We received no inventory list and no explanation of what required documentation. Dad had not promised us more, and the blank spaces belonged to the investigators rather than us.

  The Northern patrol used local time, while the traveling team used the royal seal’s clock. On a single page, their entries seemed out of order. Joshy found the conversion, and I kept both original times beside it. Changing one to make the page look tidy would erase how the mistake happened.

  “Changing a time to make the page look cleaner would create the same confusion we are supposed to prevent,” Joshy said.

  “Then we keep both and show the conversion beside them,” I suggested thoughtfully.

  Uncle Orian approved the correction without lowering the privacy barrier. We added a space for local time, royal-standard time, and the person responsible for converting between them. The adjustment revealed nothing about the coven, but it prevented another reader from mistaking different clocks for a missing hour.

  A messenger brought another sheet before we left. Two signatures appeared out of order because the investigators had signed at different stages of entry. We marked the stages instead of guessing which duty each person held. It was a small correction, but it might spare a later reader an accusation neither investigator deserved.

  “Do we record the start of the inventory even though we do not know what they are counting?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Uncle Orian answered from outside the privacy barrier.

  “You are proving when the process began, not describing its contents,” he clarified evenly.

  I recorded the start of the inventory and left its contents blank. The restriction still frustrated me, but I was beginning to see how easily a careful record could become a confident false story once someone filled an empty space with a guess.

  Before we left for the Academy, the team transmitted confirmation that every investigator remained together. Dad gave us that single administrative fact because it tested the procedure we had helped organize. Whatever the adults learned beyond it stayed inside the protected call.

  The call continued after Joshy and I returned to the Academy. Our instructors had no knowledge of the coven’s unanswered calls, and the ordinary schedule remained unchanged. Political history was still political history, combat drills still left bruises, and the younger students still argued loudly enough to be heard from the lower field.

  At the Academy, our instructor set three requests for winter supplies before us. An underground settlement needed medicine for a fever, a northern village needed heating stones after storm damage, and a distant community had too few stores to survive another delayed delivery. We could not send everyone everything.